My name is May. I’ve loved reading as long as I can remember. I’m a pretty average woman, all things considered. I have a cat, love chocolate and wine, and spend lots of time reading about hunky gay men falling in love with each other. You know, normal stuff.
I spent years thinking about starting this blog and am excited/completely overwhelmed now that it’s actually happened.
Reading gay romance is one of my favorite ways to spend time. It became a natural progression for me to start reviewing them.
I have dreams of publishing gay romance myself someday, but have settled for writing smutty short stories in the meantime. Find my Amazon author page at https://www.amazon.com/author/maylacer
My Romance Journey
It’s true, as strange as it is to say now, but I used to hate romance. I hated it with a passion and spent most of my teenage years refusing to read anything that mentioned romance in the description.
I can’t begin to say how glad I am that my feelings about romance have changed. Almost as glad as I am that I no longer think wine tastes like rotten apples. Ah, the folly of youth.
My mom instilled in me the love of reading. She’s a voracious reader, and her genre of choice is romance. Obviously, as a young child, she didn’t have me reading romance stories. I got my start with the full range of Dr. Seuss books, plus Curious George, Babar the elephant, and many others. When I got a little older, I moved onto books whose main characters were anthropomorphic animals who went on adventures. I honestly don’t even remember the names of many of these books, but under their influence I fell in love with fantasy stories of all kinds. It didn’t matter if the story was about a princess and a dragon or swashbuckling pirates, I would read anything fantasy. For years, whenever I went to the public library, I would head straight to the fantasy section without fail.
What does this have to do with my adolescent hatred of romance? Well, it was because I read fantasy, where anyone could be a hero regardless of their gender, family, or species, that I grew up believing that I could do anything. I never doubted that I could be a hero, even though I was a girl. This idea was supported by TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed, which I loved watching. If there had been no other influences on my young brain, I would have likely discovered romance stories around the time I realized boys weren’t icky. But there was one other way I was exposed to stories, and that was through my mom and her books on tape.
Aah, what a blast from the past. A combination CD and cassette player. A classic staple of the 1990s. My mom went through probably a dozen of these things. Some she wore out, others she broke, and a few my dad borrowed and never returned. I remember buying her one of these for Christmas one year. And it had to have a cassette player.
My mom is a wonderful, hardworking woman. Always has been. Back when I was a child, she did more than her fair share around the house. She worked a 9 to 5 office job, she cooked, she cleaned, and she took care of me. She always had so much to do that there simply weren’t enough hours in the day for her to sit down and read. So she listened to books-on-tape. As in cassette tape. As in “Please flip the cassette over and continue listening on side B.”
And let me tell you, she cranked the volume up LOUD. Whenever one of her stories was playing, you could hear the damn thing all through the house. It’s no wonder my dad spent so much time working outside. As a child, I didn’t mind her stories. They were background noise as I played with my toys. But as I got older, the words began to register. And I didn’t like what I heard.
Now, I’m not mean enough to reveal my mom’s age, but I will say that she was born back in the early 1950s and there is a 37 year age difference between us. I was a surprise late in life baby. So my mom has a very different view on romance than I do. The romance stories she favored back then featured women who were, at best, “plucky”. They were definitely not the fearless heroines who populated my fantasy stories. Some of my mom’s favorite leading ladies were the bumbling damsel in distress while others did try to solve their problems on their own, but at the end of the day each and every one of them needed to be rescued by a man. A classic hero, the type who was rough around the edges, a bit (or a lot) condescending, and always right.
I’m now an adult. I try my best not to kink shame, slut shame, or look down on the types of romance people chose to read. Not my business. But back when I was a preteen, when the only type of romance I was exposed to was the type my mom liked, I decided I hated romance. All of it. Because I thought that the type of romance she listened to was the only type of romance there was. I thought that whenever a woman got a boyfriend, even if she had been a brilliant person before, once she was in that relationship she became nothing more than a secondary character in her own life. I’m not being overly dramatic. This is genuinely what I thought. And because I didn’t want that, didn’t want to give up who I was just because I was dating some guy, I swore off romance.
I didn’t really date anyone until I was in college, though that could have been because I was (and still am) a huge nerd. And it wasn’t until halfway through college that I learned that there are as many different types of romantic relationships as there are stars in the sky. It was this slow but persistent eye opening, one that has taken me years to fully appreciate, that made me come to realize that not all romance is bad. I have realized that, because my parents were older, I was surrounded by older couples whose relationships were all structured the same way my parent’s marriage was structured. All of my childhood examples were exactly the same.
It feels a little excessive to say that I had to overcome the influences I grew up with, but that’s how it really feels. I can remember the moment when I first realized that none of my relationships had to be like my parent’s marriage. That I, as the woman, didn’t have to do all the cooking and the cleaning while the man fixed the things that broke and mowed the lawn. The moment I realized that my relationships could be whatever I wanted them to be was the moment I began to let go of my hatred of romance.
It took me a while to find heterosexual romance that I liked to read. And unsurprisingly, I gravitated towards fantasy romance. But when I stumbled on C. S. Pacat’s Captive Prince gay fantasy romance novel, I was hooked. I’ve been reading gay romance for years now, and I love it. It doesn’t have to be fantasy either. I’ve developed a love of contemporary romance as well, but let’s just say that it’s no surprise that I still love stories with dragons, werewolves, and magic.
There are definitely stereotypes in gay romance, just as there are in heterosexual romance. I don’t think that gay romance is better than any other type of romance. But I do enjoy it more. It’s nice not to be constantly comparing myself with a heroine, whether it’s finding myself lacking in the poise department or thinking that I wouldn’t be stupid enough to go running towards the strange sound outside. As for the heroes in the gay romance books, I can relate to them without comparing myself. I may not be a gay man, but I know what a nice man is, and I root hard for the heroes to fall in love. That, more than anything else, is what I look for in a romance book. A couple to cheer for as they overcome all the obstacles in their way and find love.
Love is Love Reviews 